The text output in the PDF converted a hyphen to a number symbol.

It could be that your hyphen character is actually an em dash, which is an extended Unicode character. I would guess that it isn't in the PDF font, so it is shown as a hash character instead.

Check if the it is any non-standard characters like em-dashes (—), en-dashes (–), or any other symbol that looks like a hyphen but isn’t (–, —, etc.). If there is any, replace with a regular hyphen (-)